Design Adaptations

Selecting a color scheme could arguably be one of the most important tasks in planning and designing a website, but it’s not always the easiest. Listed here are some great tools for discovering, creating, sharing, selecting and experimenting with color and color palettes.

kuler

With tools like this, working more color into a design can be as simple as discovering a palette someone else created! Available online or as a desktop widget, kuler makes it fun to browse and create schemes. Start with a base color and build your palette from there within a sleek, smart UI. Changing your palette is only a matter of clicking a different base color or changing a rule. Scrubby sliders allow for infinite combinations, dependent only on your imagination.

kuler from Adobe Labs

ColorBlender

Blend to your heart’s content with this online palette creation tool. Automatically create a scheme of coordinating colors, or directly edit individual colors to make a palette of your own design. When you’re satisfied, easily export to Photoshop or Illustrator. You can also save blends to go back to later.

ColorCombos

This one has a neat feature where you can enter any URL and it retrieves the color scheme used by that site. For me, this find was a huge time-saver, because I had been using ColorZilla to pick colors manually from sites I thought had a nice scheme. It was painstakingly slow. (Note: the latest version o Colorzilla allows viewing and saving palettes found on a website via the DOM Color Analyzer.) ColorCombos also has a nice testing feature, where you can enter multiple hex codes to see how your colors work together in close proximity.

ColorJack

Offers a variety of color picking and palette suggestion tools. The Sphere section shows you a color wheel and palette suggestion of six colors. Make adjustments a wheel, sliders, or choosing from one of several formulas. The Studio offers palette suggestions of three or more coordinating colors. Everything can be adjusted using the available functions or by entering your own values. There’s also a Spin button, which loads a random color scheme. ColorJack also has export features.

ColorJack

ColorSchemer

Aside from selling software, ColorSchemer provides a gallery of user created palettes you can browse freely, along with a search feature where you can enter a hex code which returns any palette containing that color. This is great if you have a base color in mind, but you’re having trouble finding or matching colors. The gallery is also a good source if you just need a little nudge of inspiration. :)

As a sidenote, an ever-present source of inspiration for choosing a palette can be found in your very own photos. Here are some great examples of color schemes sampled directly from photos.